liVAPOSt JUN 1 6 1974

Kissinger vs. Hoover On Wiret p Requests

By Laurence Stern Washington Post Staff Writer

Early on the afternoon of May 12, 1973, a middle-level FBI official named T.J. Smith emerged from the White House with two large boxes containing hundreds of pages of secret,wiretap transcripts and memoranda in his custody.

He handed a receipt to White House! attorneys J. Fred Buzhardt and Leonard Garment. A Secret, Service agent drove Smith' back to the Federal Triangle. The documents Were then re-stored to the Justice Depart- " ment building from which they had made a secret two-year -odyssey through the private safes of Washing-ton's bureaucratic strato-sphere—finally ending in the outer office of former presidential. assistant John D. Ehrlichman.

In the , 13 months since Smith returned the boxes to the Justice Department their contents_ have un-leashed a flood of contro-versy beginning with the Ellsberg case and Culminat-,ing, in Secretary of State Henry A. •Kissinger's threat to resign at his Salzburg nress conference last Tues. day.

This week, before Kis-sineer returns to Washing-ton to seek the full clear-ance he demanded as a con-dition to staying 'on the job, members of the Senate For-eign Relations Committee will begin, sifting through some of the same secret ma-terial. Kissinger asked that the committee pass final judgment on his role in the national security wiretap-ping controversy.

The documents will tell committee members, 'in the unsparing bureaucratese of the late J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI subordinates: that Kissinger's Office— initi-. ated 14 of the 17 wiretaps targeted on government offi-cials and newsmen between May. 1969, and February, 1971.

Kissinger iwas specifically named in four of the wire-tap reqtests. His chief dep-uty then, Alexander M. Haig Jr., named 10 of the surveil-lance targets, according to documents obtained by The' Washington Post. •

President Nixon was iden-tified as having asked for two of the taps through John N. Mitchell, then bis Attorney General. An addi-tional 'surveillance / was re-,onested by H. R.. (Bob) Haldeman, then the White House chief of staff'

'This is the gist of the FBI's documentary evi-dence, which stands in sharp apparent contradiction to Kissinger's initial testimony that his office - merely passed on names of persons with access to allegedly leaked documents.

"Did you at any time spe-cifically make ,a clear initia- tive; take the clear initiative yoUrself on any tap or even a single one?" Senate For- eign Relations Committee, Chairman J. W. Fulbright (D-Ark.) asked Kissinger at his nomination hearing last Sept.17.

"No," Kissinger replied in sworn testimony.

A Hoover memo to Mit-chell on May 13, 1970, said :

"On May 12, 1970, Briga-dier General Alexander M. Haig of the National Secu-rity Council Staff, advised that Dr. Henry A. Kissinger of. the White House staff, had requested that" as soon as possible a telephone sur-

veillance be \instituted on the home of "K" [Winston Lord] of the National Secu-rity Council Staff."

This is one example of the contradictory evidence in the case. Kissinger acknowl- edged in his Sept. 17, 1973, testimony that "there could have been . . . a different Perception by the FBI" of his role in the wiretap re-quests.

The suggestion has been made by officials close to the investigation that Hoo- ver, ever the consummate bureaucrat, papered'the rec- ord of the case with self-, serving declarations show- ing that all his actions in the controversial wiretap area• were authorized by others.

When the question came up before the Foreign Rela- tions Committee last Sept 10 whether Kissinger had ordered wiretaps of news- men, former acting FBI Di-rector William D. Ruckel-shaus said: "The answer is, somewhat ambiguotts. . . It may be impossible to recoil-, struct Dr. Kissinger's role from the FBI records."

,Ruckelshaus was suggest-' ing the possibility that the FBI requests naming Haig or Kissinger as initiators of wiretap requests may have been, in effect, form letters from Hoover to 'Ole Attor- ney General seeking author- ization for specific wiretaps/.

"This does not mean the `FBI records are deliberately inaccurate or are meant to cover up the true facts." Ruckelshaus added pointed- ly. "In order to satisfy this committee, I think you would have to ask him [KIS-singer] that question per-sonally."

One of the Flit summaries said that the cover letter for a request for electronic sur- veillance. of New York Times correspondent Hecli rick Smith "said that Dr. Kissinger requested the cov-erage because Smith has been in contact with, individ-uals -on whom we bad elec-tronic surveillance in the case."

Beyond the issue of who specifically . ordered t h e wiretaps there are numer-ous other 'unanswered ques-tions surround the nation al security wiretap affair.

Hoover's memo, for exam-ple, says that Kissinger first Called him to ask for a full investigation of a New York Times story an May 9, 1969, reporting the secret bernb- ing of Cambodia. Yet the, correspondent who wrote the story. William Beecher, was not placed under wire-tap surveillance until a full year after the article ap-peared,, according to the FBI records. Why? - Kissinger insisted that his office folloWed precise crite- ria in deciding'whose names to pass on for surveillance: chiefly access to informa- tion that had leaked into news media. In ' 'Salzburg last' week he added another criterion for' providing

. names to the Justice Depart-ment and FBI—"individuals who had adverse informa-tion in their security files."

Kissinger acknowledged in Salzburg that three of the four officials on the original wiretap list—Morton H. Halperin, Daniel Davidson and Helmut Sonnenfeldt-"were• appointed to the Na- firma]. Security Council staff by me over the strong objec-tion of all my associates."

Several subjects of the early wiretaps insist, though, that they had no ac-cess to the Cambodia bomb-

' ing information which was 5 closely held both in the Pentagon and a handful of top civilian aies to the President.

Haig and Kissinger's per-sonal aide, Lawrence Eagle-, burger, would have been most privy to the material figuring in the 1969 leakS but there is no evidence

they were tapped. Haig, ac-cording to the FBI, was the subject of an "applicant-type investigation" from which "no derogatory information" emerged.

The FBI documents are themselves vague' on the reasons 'for wiretap sureil-lance of specific individuals.

"Most of the electronic surveillances were insti-tuted at the request of then Colonel Haig, who said that the coverage was being re-quested on the highest au-thority," one of the FBI summaries reported. "Mem-oranda initially stated that Haig stressed that it was a Matter of most grave and serious consequence to our national security, and no other rationale was given."

In one case a wiretap was requested on a presidential

, speech writer on grounds that he was friendly with a newsman and that "F". (the speech writer) told "P" (the 'correspondent) what would be in a speech by the Presi-

dent. In Salzburg Kissinger an-

grily proclaimed that "the implication that my office , was spending its time read-ingsalatious reports by sub-ordinates is a symptom of the poisonous atmosphere that is now characteristic of our public discussion."

Yet the FBI summaries of Wiretapped conversations are peppered with • profes-sional or domestic gossip:

"During a discussion 'be-tween 'IT and his wife she asked him if he told 'Q' some ,undisclosed matter," s'

" 'Et' mentioned once that , he had seen an individual in the State. Department who hand i'e d ..Egyptian-Israeli matters, but that after 'Q's' story on ' Cambodia and other stories on Okinawa and the ABM, 'D' could not come around to see him any more; that things had gotten too; tight." - "Some of the intercepted

conversation related to drugs such as LSD and mar-ijuana."

The purpose of the Sen-ate Foreign Relation Com-mittee will be to investigate the origins rather than the results of the taps — and what Kissinger's role was 'in initiating them.

The- public testimony of officials- who are. 'familiar with the contents of the taps clearly suggests, that they , uncovered no major security lapses and / were hardly worth the price of the Pub-lic anguish they caused, ' The dispute over Kissing-

er's role is not. en the ques-tion of whether wiretapping is acceptable or nix, but whether the secretary misre-, presented his involvement in his sworn statements.

Ultimately the ' dispute will have to be resolved on the basis of who is more credible: the RBI and J. Ed-gar Hoover in their •memo, randa or Henry KisSineer in his testimony to the Senate.